In the olden days, when leftists wished to argue against gun owners, they claimed that guns were phallic symbols and that the excessive love of guns demonstrated latent homosexuality. Keep oiling and loading that pisstool, big boy. We know what you’re really doing….Can we not now claim that excessive fear of gun ownership indicates a streak of homophobia. They don’t want to ban guns. We know what they really want to ban.

To which the Perfesser adds:

Well, phallophobia, anyway. Which seems about right.

Looks like these guys are taking that "man card" thing a mite serious. Don't worry, fellas; as a person of the "gun" myself, I will defend to the death your right to bear that thang.

UPDATE. The Althouse post to which the comment is attached is ridiculous, too, but it does raise the fascinating possibility that Justice Scalia and Matt K. Lewis are only kidding which, if I could only believe it, would greatly elevate my faith in humanity.

Wait, what?! It's now "excessive" fear of gun ownership if sensible people want to ban semi-automatics and try to prevent them from getting into the hands of mentally/emotionally disturbed people? In order to prevent human blood baths like we've had in the last few months? It's phallophobia if I don't like fetishizing & deep-throating guns like Reynolds, Althouse, Huckabee, Nancy Lanza, et al. seem(ed) to do all day long for their teabagger masters? As far as I'm concerned, bullets have a nasty aftertaste (and nastier after effect).

Since Reynolds thinks that wanting to regulate firearms is phallophobia, then it would seem that he really does consider his gun to be a dick. (And if it's just hatred of firearms shouldn't it be misoguny?)

Zardoz:The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken.

The frightening thing is that a cheesy 70's Sci-Fi from the UK has more internal consistancy than the Mike Huckabee wing of the Republican party.

Bizarre as it is to type this, I actually have a tiny (visible only via electron microscope) amount of pity for Reynolds and his ilk. They immediately leapt to the defense of guns in the wake of one of the most horrific gun-violence events in recent memory, and now find themselves trying to explain away and deflect the criticism they and their position rightly drew.

Still, even Reynolds should begin realizing some day that, if your first reaction to the slaughter of 20 kindergarteners is to mount a defense of the weapons involved in that slaughter, you have a real serious problem with your priorities in this world.

Here's your reductio ad absurdum, Fat Tony. Nuclear Weapons are a type of arms. The second amendment allows "The People" the "Right to bear arms". Do The People have The Right to bear nuclear arms? Does the second amendment grant everybody the right to bear any type of arms? If you say yes, then go ahead and argue it. If you say no, then you are admitting that the government can "regulate" who can "keep and bear arms", and what types of arms can be kept by "The People".

Insta-MiniMe: ”In the olden days, when leftists wished to argue against gun owners, they claimed that guns were phallic symbols and that the excessive love of guns demonstrated latent homosexuality”.

??? No the fuck they didn't. They rightly observed that for many, owning a gun is a crutch to compensate for sexual (penis) insecurity/fragile ego. Hello! Get your facts straight.

And this is not a view of "the left." It is a widely held position rooted in Freudian psychological analysis and held by members of my politically and socially conservative relatives who are cops and gun owners themselves, just not gun nuts.

God damn these idiots are lazy!

”Can we not now claim that excessive fear of gun ownership indicates a streak of homophobia. They don’t want to ban guns. We know what they really want to ban.”To which the Perfesser adds:”Well, phallophobia, anyway. Which seems about right.”

Are you fucking kidding me? Every single day these boobs accuse us of being the homo-loving left. Our alleged decadent love of penises and pornography and gay marriage is so characteristic of who we are, according to them, that they argue it constitutes an existential threat to society.

An existential threat to society!!! That's how much we love penises above all else!!!

But today, all of a sudden, we are the opposite of who we are every other day? Today we secretly want to ban homosexuality and we fear penises because...something something? This doesn't make any sense! It doesn't make any sense at all! Is this the new "Liberals are the Real Racists" version 2.0: "The Left Hates Homos"? Just throw a word salad up there and heh-indeed about it?

Or rather, is this some cryptic coming-out message on the part of Dame Reynolds and his Queer Review where they admit that guns were their beards all along? Because as crazy as THAT sounds at least it's internally consistent logically.

Nothing at all, you're dead on target, if you'll forgive the metaphor. I went to a firing range once and fired a semi-automatic rifle clip (to research a book I was working on). For years I'd read about the big thrill you were supposed to get as you spat death at a rate of dozens of bullets per second. You know what? It was less thrilling than spraying dirty dishes with water. I really wonder what the hell passes for real emotion in their world.

It is especially hilarious the way she thinks journalism that has rushed us some inaccurate reports is just as criminal as killing 30 people. Dead is forever, but news pages refresh every few minutes -- so that's a joke, right? Good one!

I'm okay with penises. But if millions of my fellow Americans started obsessively hoarding penises, which could fire rapidly over and over again and reload almost instantly, I WOULD FIND THAT A BIT CREEPY, YES.

Oof, Matt K. Lewis, in his essay demanding people take personal responsibility for their actions, but also attacking the media for hypnotizing and coarsening us, says, "I don't blame the individual reporters or producers. They are merely players in a screwed-up game." That's a joke, right? He can't blame the media but not the people who work in it, right? So it must be a joke, and it's all jokey downhill from there, it seems, hitting flag after flag in a fast, prone skid straight through the slalom. I think he means to tell us it's ridiculous to blame guns -- we might just as credibly blame reporters? Or maybe he means it's absurd to think individuals have agency in any culture that's debased -- therefore we can't blame guns? I can't tell! What a satirist! Like the greatest American humorists, Lewis doesn't just dabble in irony, he deploys all-out incoherence.

Bart: Uh, say, are you guys crooks? Fat Tony: Bart, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? Bart: No. Fat Tony: Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them? Bart: Uh uh. Fat Tony: And, what if your family don't like bread? They like... cigarettes? Bart: I guess that's okay. Fat Tony: Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime, Bart? Bart: Hell, no.

The thing about Althouse's falling back on the "Sheesh, whassamatta, can't take a joke?" defense is that the kind of joke that a person tells is pretty indicative of the type of person that they are. See also: breasts, obsession with; vagina, comparison of onion rings with.

Well, you wouldn't be spitting dozens of bullets per second with a semi-auto so you probably meant full auto but anyway, yeah I get why it might be fun to shoot a machine gun. It's the same atavistic thrill one derives from blowing shit up real good with fireworks. I've enjoyed shooting guns because blowing shit up real good is fun. But it didn't make me want to own one. It didn't make me believe I needed one for self defense or that I could oppose the local police, much less the government when it came time to water the tree of liberty with the blood of etc. "Because I like to blow shit up real good" might be one of the more legitimate reasons to own a gun.

You can't make me click and Althouse link. We joke a lot about "not getting out of the boat" but I'm not getting out of the boat. I'm not getting in the boat. I'm not going anywhere near the shore. I'm staying in a mountain top retreat. I'm climbing Everest. I'm heading to the moon. Because getting out of the boat means discovering something, inevitably, so meretricious, so meanspirited, so stupid that only--ONLY--a lifetime of pickling someone's brains in alcohol could serve as any excuse for reading it, let alone writing it.

Reminds me of an amicus brief filed by Apu in one of the class action lawsuits against Krusty The Klown. "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in tainted cough syrup generally presents many complexities."

I will admit that the thing I find so depressing about Althouse and Reynolds is that they are gainfully employed despite providing repeated demonstrations in very public forums and they are incapable of rational thought. And despite repeatedly being very public embarrassments to the institutions that employ them.

Yes, absolutely. Our push to legalize gay marriage is another part of the plot to ban homosexuality. That's how we know which couples need to be picked up and sent to reeducation camps. And if you register at Walt's Gun Shack, you make it that much easier for us, bwahahaha!

Oh, holy FSM. Althouse and Reynolds also approvingly quote this supposed witticism: "What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"/"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?"

They're law professors, yet they claim this is a reductio ad absurdum (supposedly offered in somewhat good faith) that the left is too irrational to understand… rather than a painfully bad false analogy chosen out of spite (alas, ever a primary motive of right-wingers). For added hilarity, Reynolds accuses liberals of being un-American, and approvingly quotes an Althouse commenter who huffily declares that the right magnanimously didn't attack the gay community (!!!) over Sandusky, and people who dislike gun owners aren't just bigots, they're the real bigots. (Well, I suppose if offers slight variety from their racial stuff.)

The most charitable interpretation of their "point" is that not all gun owners are mass murderers in waiting, which is true, but has someone seriously argued otherwise? Oh, the persecution complex… Is there any part of this supposedly clever rejoinder that doesn't miss?

Lessee, the "gun community" is conflated with the "right-wing gun absolutists," liberals somehow don't know what the right-winger response will be but still only want to spend their time shaming them rather than actually passing gun safety laws (and gathering support for the same), the religious right and NYT conservative concern trolls suddenly never have existed, pedophilia is conflated with homosexuality, pedophilia is rampant in the U.S. beyond any other nation in the world… and the gay community has actively opposed every possible measure to curtail it, disliking someone for choosing to own a gun is equivalent to disliking someone for their skin color (which wasn't chosen, duh), and the love of one's gun is a natural thing, found in nature and throughout recorded human history, indeed, back to Greek times. "You see, Johnny, when a man and his gun love each other very much…"

It's not just that these people are dumb, it's that they're so spiteful. From Romney's 47% remarks to this crap, they're just (sad to say) delusional assholes. If they'd just go off to Galt's Gulch or wherever, it wouldn't be so bad, but they're determined to fight angry rearguard actions against the most innocuous, common sense measures, so we can't have nice things.

Ah, but that's the beauty of wingnut "philosophy." Recognition and awareness are completely unnecessary, because there's a superficial and wholly contrived "principle" to be preserved.

Look at all the other ways "conservative" conventional wisdom is employed--from tax cuts for the rich increase jobs, to tax cuts increase revenues, etc., all justified as if they were sound, solid principles to be upheld, even though they've been proven in practice to be utterly fraudulent--and even when shown to be fraudulent, are then proposed as the means to correct the problem they created in the first place.

Same with guns--the more disorderly society becomes due to unregulated firearms, the more there is a need to create order in society--with unregulated firearms. It's a lot like "we need tax cuts to maintain prosperity" in fat times, juxtaposed with "we need tax cuts to achieve prosperity" in lean times. There's no condition where tax cuts are not necessary. Equally, there's no condition where guns aren't essential. That's the conservative notion of a principle.

For Reynolds, this relieves him of any requirement for introspection and evaluation. The core value of contemporary conservatism is intellectual fraud, which in turn expresses itself in Reynolds and others as self-deceit. That's a powerful means of ignoring reality, and I don't expect Reynolds and his cohort to give that up anytime soon. For Reynolds, it's a good thing he's teaching law. If he were practicing it, he'd be in a heap of trouble.

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I'd add that this condition is not just a "relief" from introspection and evaluation, it is a core part of the very definition of a certain type of conservatism (i.e. wingnuts, teabaggers, etc, rather than those who choose conservatism for opportunistic or lazy reasons).

While most people have developed internal ethical skeletons, which allow for a stronger society of folks who can stand on their own and make positive decisions and actions when environmental conditions change--in other words, social and intellectual adaptability--those creatures that fall collectively in the conservatoid branch of humanity did not develop any internal system of ethics or intellect, relying solely on artificial external sources of ethical support.

This difference alone contributes to most conflict amongst social groups. Progressive and liberal solutions to challenges simply are irrelevant to the conservatoids, who are absolutely unable to function without a rigid external support system. Authoritarianism, whether in the form of organized religion, government, or "secret" societies, is not only very attractive to these types, it is probably a requirement for survival.

I believe only a small number of self-described conservatives are truly this way, but there are enough cynical opportunists taking advantage of them for profit (riding the snails) and other frightened and intellectually lazy folks who take up the lifestyle unnecessarily just because it's such an easy way out of a complicated life.

Problem is, it is an evolutionary dead end being artificially prolonged and could drag the human race down with it.

And despite repeatedly being very public embarrassments to the institutions that employ them.

Apparently, the only way they'd become very public embarrassments is if they used obviously metaphorical references to beheading [Double-checks the Ol' Perfesser's call for "heads to roll" over Benghazi] ... and weren't conservatives.

"What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"/"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?"

Jesus. OK, pretending for a minute there's a point anywhere in the vicinity of this notion(there isn't) because I have a vivid imagination and can try to imagine what it's like to be this brain damaged, how about if the first thing this "gay community" did was defend pedophilia as a right and constantly work to weaken pedophilia laws because, hey, they obviously don't work? Or maybe argue more people working with kids should be pedophiles because they'd be able to protect kids from the pedophilia of others? Enjoy your reductio ad absurdum, assholes.

Continue to push back against campus homophobia, work to change minds so that marriage equality in Pennsylvania becomes ... Oh, wait, you guys were just displaying your normal vicious bigoted assholishness with the most goddamn stupid attempt at false equivalence I've seen this week. Never mind.